The Many Faces of Fascism

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The definition of fascism has been allusive. If fascism is simply a synonym for brutality, then fascists are nothing but schoolyard bullies writ large. Clearly, however, fascism as imagined by its originator, Benito Mussolini, possessed an ideology and the attributes of a revolutionary movement, despite its willingness to accommodate Italy’s existing institutions of church and throne. The German Nazis were less accommodating to their nation’s status quo, yet were more conservative in their aesthetics than Italy’s fascists who were modernists allied with the Futurist movement. Other distinctions were apparent. As confirmed racists, the Nazi Party had no Jewish members, yet Jews were found in the ranks of the Fascist Party.

If Fascism in power is inevitably defined as a one-party state headed by a charismatic leader, then what to make of the Asian end of the Axis, Japan? Whatever his level of responsibility for the war conducted in his name, Emperor Hirohito was not operationally in charge and the prime ministers and cabinets that ruled in his name revolved like a merry-go-round.

This is the backdrop for Reto Hoffman’s The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952 (Cornell University Press). A lecturer in history at Australia’s Monash University, Hoffman unpacks the complicated relations between Italian fascists and various individuals and groups in Japan from the 1920s through the defeat of the Axis and its aftermath. Mussolini had Japanese admirers among the intelligentsia and the political set, but the equation was balanced by the search for a particularly Japanese way and awareness that the emperor’s unique status ruled out the “caesarism” that was one of fascism’s hallmarks. The dialogue between Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy did not occur only on the right of the empire’s political spectrum, but also among liberals intrigued with the manliness and modernity of Mussolini’s ideology. If Japan never became a fully fascist state, fascists and their sympathizers were influential in leading the empire to destruction.

Mussolini and Hitler agreed that the future of their movements depended on molding young people by indoctrinating them in body, mind and spirit. In Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (University of Wisconsin Press), Alessio Ponzio explores the elaborate programs of radical transformation established by the Italian Fascists and emulated by the Nazi Germans. Holding power was only the means to an end for Mussolini and Hitler, who had grand designs of remodeling their nations and (at least for Hitler) remaking the world. As Ponzio writes, it was “necessary to change the habits and character of their peoples” through education. Neither ruler had faith in the generations that came of age before they established their new order. Older people were damaged goods, unable to “radically change their way of being and thinking.”

France’s Croix de Feu is a curious case. The organization began, like the Italian fascists, as a militant association of World War I veterans engaged in thuggery against their opponents. By the late 1930s, however, the Croix morphed into a social movement dominated by women still struggling for the right to vote—except in French North Africa, where the Croix became the megaphone (and billy club) of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim settlers. In Political Belief in France, 1927-1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Francais (Louisiana State University), author Caroline Campbell surprisingly identifies the organization as the “largest political movement in French history.” During World War II most of the Croix’s leaders supported Vichy until it became clear that the new regime had become a puppet of the hated Germans.

Fascism’s disregard for human rights reached its zenith in the Nazi concentration camps, which spread like a net across the captive nations of Europe overrun by Germany. One of the most readable and comprehensive accounts, Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), begins by describing the haphazard establishment of the camps in the early months of Hitler’s rule. Racing to punish political opponents, settle scores and terrorize dissenters, rival Nazi leaders and rank-and-file organized hundreds of camps, some of them simply buildings commandeered as makeshift prisons. In the early years Germany’s civil authorities actually brought charges against some Nazis for murdering or abusing prisoners, until the regime cowed the judges and prosecutors. The brown-shirted bullies of the SA ran many of the early camps, only to be violently pushed aside by their rivals, the more sophisticated black uniformed SS.

At first, Jews were a distinct minority among the prisoners, and while their extermination became a core objective of the SS after the Final Solution was instituted in 1942, the camps included a rainbow of outsiders (identified by colored triangles), among them Gypsies, gays, Communists and political opponents of many hues, “a-socials” and others caught in the widening spiral of terror. What emerges from Wachsmann’s exhaustive study is not so much the banality of evil but the normality of evil among the SS. Often motivated by careerism as much as hatred, the camps’ administrators and guards exerted themselves into deepening cruelty. Even after Nazism’s defeat, “they continued to believe in the righteousness of their actions.”

If KL has a weakness it is Wachsmann’s relative lack of interest in the ideology that propelled the Nazi crimes, which could leave readers wondering how blind hatred could organize itself into such an elaborate infrastructure of destruction.